Don Schaeffer's Poems

Enjoy my poems and other creations.
Slide shows with poetry and music are at:
http://www.photoshow.net/schaefferphotos/favorites

Friday, June 30, 2017

A Pirouette

What were oncebad habits have turned goodand I will always havepleasure. No matter howgrim the world gets,little riches andquiet pursuits willfind their wayinto my privatewaking dreams untilmy life and mydreams come to merge.

Sunday, June 25, 2017

The Moving Cabal

When he comesthe cabal forms with him.And she becomes the joint enemy. Comfortand companionshipwins. Nobody is lonely.When she comesthe cabal forms with herand he becomes the jointenemy. It is comfortingto have a companion in critique.And me. Even when I'm with you,the cabal forms along the linesof you and others. It'sa form of friendshipto make me a stranger.

Monday, June 19, 2017

Being and Nothingness

I stand just outside the crowd watching
them speaking in nouns about what everybody recognizes and knows,
things everybody can agree on. That's what makes them whole, what
wakes them up in the morning. That's what the day is and what the
night is not. They face each other every morning and talk about
agreed things—interspersing the nouns with words of motion and
action so that the words make things happen to each other in their
brains.

And if a new thing, gathers space, and
squeezes itself into birth for them. It may take time, but there will
eventually be a new noun which everyone will append to their
conversation—in the meantime exchewing some old nouns. And
civilization chugs along like an amazing ameboid, alternatively
adding and shedding, extending forward and shrinking behind.

They all have exquisite models in their
brains, populated by the things the nouns represent and made dynamic
by the verbs. In fact they don't need the words, they lose them
sometimes and can't reach out to the things that everybody has in
their brains, everybody understands. But they can always get some
help. These things are real. They always stand and sit around making
sounds corresponding to the names of things everybody recognizes,
although not everybody has personally experienced. Reality doesn't
have to have activated the senses to be real. The senses, in a
futuristic or fictional form, or in the form of suspended doubt and
trust are welded into the words and into the brain models that form
the currency the word are the tokens for.

I watch this. Beware! They are map
makers and chart makers. They are formulators of elements. They push
each piece, articulated, needed, useful into the asymmetrical matrix
of their lives and stamp reality on each piece by bringing it forth
to the mass. They view spaces that their eyes stretch open and they
know spaces spread out by the movement of time. They make things out
of empty spaces and gatherings of elements. All these are rounded and
hardened by their tokens and sharing into inflections of the gasseous
cloud around them.

There are no colors here. Light burns
harder here and less hard there and the particles slam into the stone
at different rates. What they think they see is just their joint
illusion. The air is vacant except for the wind. With mouths they
make these tiny disturbances. They are lucky they can do that. What a
bleak skeleton is the Earth, yet they rejoice in delusion. They see
themselves in every crook and twist of the molecules. They see their
faces where there is no intelligence and no life, in the barrens.

He turned from the ice cold table where
the specimen was pinned out legs and arms akimbo and abdomen exposed.
The blood stained welts were visible on the flanks and inner thighs.
He turned away from the humiliating, uncaring death and stalked out
of the lab. There was no getting sympathetic with them, he thought.
Research needs distance. We can learn about ourselves only by
studying an alien subject, else our viewing and our feelings will
change what we observe. He knew that universal principle. And it was
also a matter of power. To observe and to cut off sympathy made him
feel so good. He could render them helpless and open them, violate
them. He couldn't avoid the sense fo triumph.

The feelings were like fluid gasses
rolling over the trees, making the colors, drawing them to the
colors. The community never believed in colorlessness. The Earth
lived in colors, the insects, the birds, the monkeys, we all hated
the rocks. Color was the subject of God. Color was what God breathed
on us. It was inside us. A translation into the language of our
bodies and the bodies of the creatures around us. The people smelled
the life of the soil in the air. The world spoke together in the
alphabet of maps.

Wednesday, June 14, 2017

Another Planet in the Same Old Universe

It's
Earth day 14 of the Mars mission. We wake in the middle of the
Martian night. It doesn't matter. When we started this we knew
everything would be relative and everything would be switched around
and changed. We were not people, none of us were, who loved our lives
on Earth so much that we couldn't just dump it. None of us had
cherished routines or even special food likes. None of us were
comforted that easily, that's how we were selected. The discomfort
test is one of the most valid psychological tests ever formulated.
Bless the Harvard professors who wrote it.

At
the same time, the big shots were a little disappointed with the
mission because things were not different or variable enough.
This was hardly a challenge that tested any of us. There was
solid sand at our well-covered and masked feet. We never flew when we
jumped, even though we could jump pretty far. In the distance there
were things we still called mountains and hills. The same old sun
rose in the martian morning, even though it was so pale and small it
made most of us laugh, an emasculated sun god. Ha ha!

Were
we going home? I think so. That's what they told us. Soon. I could
live with the fear. I like fear. It has a pleasant jiggle on my
heart. Anyway what could happen? We could just continue our journey
and travel to a lot stranger places.

We
rise. We check everything to verify that nothing really happened. We
nutrify; we expel; like the our microscopic
fellow citizens we so carefully pasteurized out of our lives,
ignoring what the gods of bugs wanted us to
do--currying their disfavor. We believed our god was bigger than
theirs and our god would defend us. But we ended up defending our god
instead.

It
is cold on Mars. We conserve heat and generate it slowly.

Why
does this section of existence feel like home? We have never been
here, yet we feel familiar--as if it were another room in a great
house. It's subject to familiar rules--the rules we have followed
since we popped--were carried and expelled into this territory around
Old Sol.

On
the 18th day of the Mars Mission, our cynical crew learned
that the Archetype was coming. We were told that the being looked
very strange, but was very mild, and that, somehow we all knew him,
we had seen this being before. This being was the core of the
neighborhood.

The
great orb of the Archetype rose in the west of the martian sky, just
as the sun was making its thin, frail appearance in the east. In
spite of the vacuum of space we could hear the song, as if it were
sung by a million voices. It had at least a million eyes,
surprisingly human-like with round pupils, Blinking in waves around
the face. Kindness suffused the moist surfaces of the eyes, the
sadness of eyes that could comprehend the limits. And somehow, we all
remembered that face. We had all seen it in the past, while we were
travelling from the space before.

Saturday, June 10, 2017

Humphrey (You Tube Reading)

Humphrey

Old Humphrey at 80 stood at the edge of
The Grand Canyon and he knew. He knew there was this world and it was
very big and full of visions, some of which could be touched and some
only distant. Then there was the gateway and a backward—gear-broken
cheaply made time machine. And there was the gateway to things that
didn't exist at all, except elements did, pasted together with
wishes. All this kept him continuously young and hopeful. So he
stood, bandy-legged, in his old man touristy shorts showing his
crusty, bumpy stomach to a
disinterested crowd of young tourists from The University of Northern
Arizona.

Standing amidst the forest of memories
that clouded his eyes and made him keep shaking his head, the vision
of one twelve-year-old girl, when he was sitting on the root of a
tree back in Maryland, when she asked, “are you a man or a boy?”
Aside from blushing, he didn't know how to respond at fourteen.

Electronics made a lot of things
possible that couldn't have happened before. Humphrey knew that there
were lots of other worlds with larger canyons even than this. He knew
that they were all the same once you landed on them though. You
always fell downward and had the familiar difficulty with your bandy
knees, walking. The sky was some boring color. And they always felt
like what they were, worlds, places. You coped with them.

“Another planet,” he chanted,
“another planet, small steps.”

When it's morning and I emerge from the
first circle where there is only me dripping with ectoplasmic yolk.
The sunlight is low, reminding me loudly through the window. I come
out of it slowly and meet with you, people of the symbol, halfway out
of dreams. Slowly my sources of pain, fragrance, touch come back to
me.

Then, the voice of a young woman
broke through the milk of his Humphrey's mind.

“Dad! Dad!” the female voice was
saying. He turned slowly, absently. Who was this girl? He was rising
from a coma. “We have to go,” she was saying.

Then he said something that scared
her. “You don't need this world of feet, Wendy. There is enough in
you. You can live forever in a world of whispers and dreams.”

It occurred to him—the heat
and the reverie were doing odd things to his brain. Now now I'm back
to earth, boring and real, real and boring, when there is so much out
there, unbelievable adventure. Humphrey looked at his daughter whom
he began to recognize again.

Saturday, June 03, 2017

Good Morning Spring

When I risein the morningI say hello to the rosesslowly expiring in my vase, stillloaded with mystery. Theywave their petals at me.Still alive I see.And I smile.She dries themto save a vestige of their tinteternal in rose afterlife,they do not wave back.